Session 17

The gang are stood in a strange dungeon, staring at a solid wall of green on the far side of the room. What on earth is this weird barrier? How am I supposed to progress from here?

Re-wind a little way.

I come back to the game and my characters are stuck in the shop with huge quantities of food weighing them down! Oh no! I swear I didn't save the game when this happened!!! This is horrible!

What makes it worse is that I'm going to have to euthanise these guys again - I don't really like abandoning characters when they're still alive just to re-load their younger selves and prune away this branch of their story. I thought it was painful enough to do it at the end of the last session - but now it turns out that I didn't prune hard enough and the stump has carried on growing!

What has actually happened is the game seems to auto-save when you switch it off! It's actually a really cool feature! When you've finished playing you just turn the game off, then when you come back to it you pick "Continue" from the main menu and it picks up from wherever you left off!

These days that's not a particularly amazing feature - most console games do the same now. But I certainly don't remember any other PC games being so user friendly all that time ago! It's only a shame that what's brought the feature sharply to my attention is the resurrection of my over-laden characters, begging not to be banished to the void of a history that should never have been.

Oh well, never mind. Main Menu. Load Game. Load slot 1.

I quickly play back through to where I left off - only instead of buying over a thousand food supplies, I bought a measly 150 (30 per character). I don't know how many rests that will keep me fed for, but at least I'll be able to move freely. I save the game just to minimise the damage of any subsequent stupid errors.

It's interesting actually, I've tried to watch the amount the food goes down each time I rest to get a feel for how much is "a lot" of food. It's surprisingly hard to monitor since all the characters' food supplies are shown separately and I'm fairly sure the amount changes depending on how hurt people are (if this isn't the case, it certainly SHOULD be - that's how I'D'VE designed it at least).

Off I trot back to the dungeons of Drinno. It occurs to me that the actual dungeons aren't "Basement 1" and "Basement 2" - they're actually "3" and "4" since the library they're below is already the second floor down from the surface! This is quite an impressive subterranean citadel!

I head directly for my lowest level so far - basement 4. Feeling quite relaxed about it now (despite the fact that last time I was here I got horribly killed up) I take time to investigate the pressure plate puzzle that I ignored last time round.

The room is laid out with three rows of three pressure plates spaced quite far apart. Between the rows are moving flame jets that are just sliding back and forth along the length of the room.

There's no obvious clues as to what pattern of plates I should switch on, but since I can switch them on or off, I assume it's not going to be just as simple as "switch them all on". There must be some kind of cunning hint somewhere round here - maybe to do with the now long-since-wilted pot plants in the corners of the room...

Oh wait no I'm wrong. It IS as simple as switch them all on. That's a bit lame.

I guess the idea was that I was supposed to be weaving in and out of the flames to dexterously hit each pad without getting burned. But actually, even with the very slow first person controls, this is no effort at all.

A door opens to the side of the room and stepping through into an ante chamber I find a chest full of weapons, a gem and some arrows.

Well fair enough, I guess I'll carry on round to where I got nearly-killed last time.

Back at the t-junction with the fountain, I fill up all my water buckets. Then I find that water buckets are a LOT heavier when they're full and my team can't move from the spot! Ooops!

Thankfully discarding buckets that I stole in the first place is no bother, so I thin my collection down to just three and carry on.

This floor of the dungeon is amazingly empty now! I guess that I killed the last set of baddies last time I was down here. All that's left is a sort of flame-spout room (where I walked delicately round the flame spouts to bag myself a gem and a crystal dagger) the stairs down to the next floor (which I found behind a flame jet that I put out with a bucket of water - but ignored for now since I hadn't got the whole floor mapped) and a flame-and-levers puzzle.

The flame and levers puzzle sees three levels behind three flame spouts. I put out the first flame and pulled the lever behind it. Then I put out the second flame and pulled the lever behind that. As I put out the second flame, the first came back on again.

I headed back to the fountain and filled my buckets up with water again, put out the third flame and pulled that lever too, and the near-by door opened.

Seriously? This is ANOTHER totally rubbish puzzle. Does it even count as a puzzle if you just have to pull all the levers or press all the pressure plates? I mean - that's more just a task than a puzzle. I'd've been more than willing to do some full on Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder / Lands of Lore style work-out-what-lever-does-what investigation work here! That sort of thing (if done properly) can be really rewarding - and ties in nicely to the sense of exploring a location. You have to get to know the environment and then spot what changes are triggered by levers and stuff. I guess maybe that's a style of puzzle that's gone out of fashion these days - but this game wasn't made these days! It was made in those days!

Bah. Well anyway, through the door is a locked chest that I can't get into prompting me to trudge back upstairs and into town to buy more lock-picks.

I quite like the game's approach to lock picking. Basically anyone can do it, but each pick only works once. If you want to be able to pick a lock, you've got to come prepared. It's a slight shame that you don't have to work to find picks, or that there's always easily enough picks for every lock available. It would've been cool to have to say "Oh crumbs, the locked chest or the locked door, which do I open with my pick I bought!" then later to find a second pick in an alcove in a hidden chamber so that I can say "Awesome! A second pick! Now I can go back and open that door/chest I didn't open before!"

Anyway, on my way back into the dungeon - on basement 3 (formerly basement 1 until I changed the numbering) Hofstedt suddenly has a spark of inspiration on how I could solve one of the puzzles I solved ages ago.

"Look Tom!" he pipes up as we're trying to hurry back the chest that may well contain some awesome treasure "These swords are arranged in a cross shape! I think it must be more than a simple co-incidence!"

I actually couldn't see any swords arranged in a cross, but more importantly this is a clue for the pressure plate puzzle I overcame hours ago - the one where you mirror the arrangement of flame-spouts to progress. Why would he tell me this now.

I imagine Dirr, Sira and Mellthas looking at him confused while Tom feels almost pitying. Is Hofstedt finally losing it? Is the pressure of being stranded on a strange planet and having to run sex errands for its anachronistic inhabitants getting to him? Is he starting to crack? Certainly being naked in an apparently demon infested dungeon might be enough to push anyone's sanity to the limit... Maybe I should look after him a bit better...

I resolve to get him some clothes at the next opportunity - as a comfort. Considering how inhabitants of H.P. Lovecraft stories are regularly sent batty just by meeting a man in a sea-shell chariot in a hut in the mist on a hill it would be a bit hard to expect this poor old government inspector to be totally undaunted by crash landing on a mysteriously inhabited planet (where he expected desert) where there are body snatching cat people, haunted talking buildings filled with giant maws, magic wielding Celtic folk from beyond history and virility enhancing crystal merchants being held prisoner / killed by actual demons.

Back at the chest, I pick the lock and find a new kind of crystal dagger - a different colour from the ones I have already! This one is red so probably a fire spell - I shall have to give it a test drive next time I meet some nasties!

I saunter over to the steps down to the next level. I've been feeling very casual up to this point - there's no monsters about so there's been nothing to worry me recently. But as I stare down into the depths of the dungeon I think perhaps it might be prudent to prepare myself...

I dig out the scroll of banish demon and decide I'll try and get Mellthas to learn it. That way he should be good to protect me from more than one demon if more than one demon should show up.

Irritatingly the stupid man is too low level to do it.

"Ugh, you're so USELESS!" mutters Sira

Mellthas holds up a card with "It's hardly my fault!" written on it, but Sira knocks it out of his hands and pokes him in the eye

"I knew I should've listened to my mother and had a strange mystical bonding with Ralf from over the road. He runs his own business now you know!"

"But Sira! We're like the river flowing together!" he scrawls on a pad.

"Oh that old line..."

"Can't you feel the salmon of my love leaping up the waterfall of your gullet?" he scribbles.

There's a pregnant pause.

Sira fixes her gaze on her erstwhile boyfriend.

"I'm turned on now."

So maybe I won't be any much better prepared than I am already for Basement 5. But to break the horrible tension of the moment Tom coughs and announces "Come along, no sense standing around chatting"

"Yes, good idea Tom. These steps won't walk down themselves you know" chips in Dirr.

And here's where you came in at the start of this post.

As the gang reach the next floor down, they're confronted with a large empty room - on the far side of which is a glowing green wall.

There's no clear explanation of what the wall is. As you move up close to it, it turns out to be translucent. It looks to be a sort of gelatinous block running along the back wall of the chamber and behind the far right hand end there is a passage disappearing into the distance.

In the centre of the room is a pressure plate and a small hole in the floor.

Each time you press the plate, a wandering flame spout comes out of the pit and starts to chase you!

However, in tandem with this a hole appears in the gelatinous wall. Each time you press the plate, the hole moves along a notch from left to right.

The "puzzle" is just to press the plate enough times to get the hole in line with the passage in the corner of the room without being burned to a crisp by the flames.

Excellently there's also a secret button in one of the patches of back wall the jelly reveals half-way through the process. Taking time out from flame-dodging to press it rewards the team with a stash of treasure! This time it's a "Sun dagger" and a gem hat! I decide not to put the hat on right away in case it's cursed and I add the sun dagger to my list of weapons-that-are-probably-magical-and-need trying out!

When I get through the jelly wall into the passage beyond I'm set upon by some more warniaks. No sign of demons yet - and these guys are distinctly soft nowadays. I don't even have to pull out any of my magical arsenal to deal with them.

There's another pressure plate back here too. But all it seems to do is set fire to me whenever I press it. Not very helpful - especially since I'm not keen to rest because I don't want to have to put Hof, Dirr and Tom through another 8 hours of man-on-cat mage loving just yet...

At the far end of the passage is a room with two doors and a pit in it. The doors both appear to be locked. Lucky me! I brought along a couple of picks!

Oh. The picks don't work. And they're used up by my trying them on the doors! Gah! Never mind, there's still a hole in the floor I can throw myself down in despair.

Actually, I don't throw my plucky gang of adventurers down it - instead I just rappel down with a rope I've been carrying since who-knows-when. I just KNEW I was going to need it at some point!

As I drop down into the basement below (Basement 6 I guess) I just check that I can use the rope to get back up from here... Thankfully I can - so no fear of being trapped just yet.

The room I've descended into is small with a door to my left and a corridor leading away to the north.

I check the door first - this one's not locked and leads to a room with funny looking blue skulls up the walls (which you can't even "examine" so they must just be scenery). There's a staircase upwards here which leads into another room, this time with an earthy floor and a locked door blocking progress. I guess (and confirm it by looking at the map) that this door leads into the upper end of pit room and is one of the ones I wasted a lock pick on from the other side earlier...

Back down to Basement 6 and I notice that it's not just that one room with skulls up the walls - it's actually the general motif here... Weirdly this suggests that the druids used to like skull walls back in the day...

Actually, I noticed that since this game is set in the 2200's - the war that drove the naughty druids out of Drinno is meant to have happened something like 200 years ago now. It's funny to imagine that if this game were real, then somewhere out in space there's a planet of cat people and humans for whom the splitting of the druids into the clans of nice-druids and assasin-druids is as distant event as the marriage of Napoleon and Josephine and the Mexican war of independence...

Anyway - just along the corridor from where I climbed down the pit to this floor are cages of warniaks! Three cased to be exact... And on right clicking on the bars you can either "examine" or "manipulate" them. I move the pointer over "examine" and then accidentally click manipulate instead. Oops!

In the game world I imagine what happened was this: Dirr steps forwards to take a closer look at the bars with her night vision. Meanwhile Mellthas and Sira steal a secret kiss in the darkness while no-one's looking ("who cares about these dangerously sprung cage bars... KISS ME!") but Hofstedt blunders into them as he catches up ("dangerously sprung cage what? OOF!").

Sira is knocked off balance and is grasping for something to steady herself ("Arg! Bars you fool!"). She snatches the collar of Mellthas's cape yanking him into a doubled over position (he's just finished writing out "Dangerous WHAT cage bars?" on a card he had held behind Sira's head whilst they were kissing)

As he bends forward he head-buts Tom in the ass shoving him forwards ("What do you think about them D-erk!") He stumbles and pushes himself up against Dirr at the bars of the cage. Dirr - being a topless cat lady - has her boobies poke uncomfortably through the bars of the Warniak cage! ("It looks like any pressure at all could... OOPS!" *poik* *poik*)

Hofstedt (secretly in love with her you'll remember) rushes forwards to delicately extricate them for her ("Don't worry fair maiden! You boobies wil always be safe while I'm around!")

Having freed the objects of his affection from the bars - Hofstedt thinks this is going to be one of those magic moments he's dreamed of for the whole time he's been on this planet. Remembering how Mellthas had got Sira to fancy him, Hof pulls his most chivalric don't-worry-fair-maiden-your-boobies-will-always-be-safe-while-I'm-around and goes to poke Dirr in the Trii.

Dirr, who is a rough tough fighting sort of girl and didn't NEED to be groped out of the bars of the cage since she was perfectly fine to do it herself, has no patience for anyone to be poking her in the face and gives Hof an open palmed slap in the chops. ("You fool! Those bars are dangerously sprung!")

Hof topples against the bars of the cage and the clanging impact of his still gurning face on them sets hidden cogs rumbling...

There's a moment of horrified silence as the bars judder... then start to rise! The horrible warniaks within buzzing frantically for the fight!!! This can only go badly!

"Uh oh" says everyone in unison.

But actually it doesn't. The warniaks are pretty easily dispatched in the first cage. There's no treasure in here though so, feeling cocky, we move on to the next one.

Another bunch of warnicks and, this time, an intentional cage opening rewards us with a decorative sword.

In the last cage there's a tougher bunch of warniaks. They give us a run for our money and the poison on their leader leaves Dirr INSANE!

Mercifully I have a potion for that and her mind is quickly cleared. Thank goodness really! I can't imagine it's easy to get a fierce lady cat warrior back up a rope and away to medical attention while she is insane with poisoning!

At the far end of this cage is a level. I pull it and nothing much seems to happen... nothing, that is, until I walk back out into the passage when I'm confronted with...

A DEMON!!!!!!!

A horrible monster that looks like a cluster of 4 hands with a pair of flaming eyes in the centre is just hovering down the corridor towards me!

I've been waiting a while to get into a tussle with some more interesting monsters than warniaks and krondirs - but this bad-boy looks like he's probably more than I was bargaining for!

The beastie is thankfully alone - and I decide that the best thing I can do is go for a quick kill. Throw everything I can at it and hope to take it out before it has many turns to nobble me first.

Everyone with a magical weapon sets it off - and Melthas uses "boasting" because it's a wild-card. I've no idea what the spell does, but it might just be the answer to all my problems!

In the end, it doesn't do anything much... at least, not that I can distinguish. The game tells me it hit, and there's a crazy sound effect! The monster (which the combat screen names as a level 1 "fear") has a sort of spooky ghost effect triggered on it. But it doesn't do any damage and the monster doesn't run away.

The Fear's not fussed for our attacks and sits back and kills Tom outright with a sort of rainbow effect spell.

The rest of the party advance and this time they're DEFINITELY not going to let it take another pop at them!

It's Dirr who kills it in the end! Her two weapons technique (one in the hands and one held on the tip of her tail) means she gets two strikes per round - just enough to evaporate the fear into a cloud of glowing fire-smoke...

The team stops to nurse Tom back to health. Everyone's tired now so they're happy to rest a while.

When they're all back to fully functional - they walk down the passage to see what the "fear" was guarding...

Turns out it was a chest with a key in it. The key, in fact, to the door up the stairs back into the upper pit room in basement 5. And the same key opens the other door out of that chamber...

As the weary Dirr turns the key in this second lock, the team exchange glances. Thank heavens! We've beaten the demon! This room must surely contain our awesome reward and imprisoned Chemist!

Clunk!

The door makes a creaking wooden sound (despite the fact that it's made of metal and doesn't open on hinges - it raises up into the ceiling). As the exhausted gang step forward to finally claim their prize, brushing demon soot off their clothes, a GIANT FIREBALL WIZZES PAST THEIR NOSES!!!!!!

Not finished yet guys! Not finished yet!